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Mexico Kills a Drug Kingpin, but the Body Gets Away

MEXICO CITY — It seemed such a triumphant moment in the drug war: the leader of the Zetas, one of the country’s biggest and most ruthless gangs, killed by the celebrated Mexican Marines in a fierce battle with guns and grenades.

Then armed men snatched his body, right under the government’s nose.

The twin developments — the killing of Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, one of the most wanted men in Mexico and the United States, followed by the theft of his corpse before authorities had even publicly identified it — left Mexican officials struggling on Tuesday to explain how a major blow against the nation’s criminal organizations could suddenly turn into an illustration of their persistent strength.

“It started out like a Rambo movie and ended up like Woody Allen,” said Diego Enrique Osorno, author of a new book on the Zetas.

It would not be the first time that Mexico’s powerful drug gangs have struck back after an apparent victory by the authorities. Gunmen have freed their allies from jail, rescued them from hospitals, taken away their fallen colleagues from crime scenes and even killed family members of a special forces sailor involved in a successful raid on a top drug lord.

This instance was particularly embarrassing because the authorities had to admit to losing the body at a time when they said they were making major inroads in controlling the cartels, arresting several top leaders of the Zetas and other groups.

On Tuesday morning, the Mexican Navy, of which the marines are a part, said that fingerprint and facial analysis proved that Mr. Lazcano had been killed in a battle on Sunday afternoon in Coahuila State, in a small town about 120 miles south of Texas.

But very soon after the announcement, the state prosecutor acknowledged that a group of heavily armed assailants, with their faces covered, showed up at the funeral home where Mr. Lazcano’s body had been taken and forced the funeral director to drive it away in a hearse.

Photo

Heriberto Lazcano, known as El Lazca and the main leader of the Zetas, was one of Mexico’s most wanted criminals.Credit
Mexican Attorney General’s Office, via European Pressphoto Agency

“Instead of it being a big success, it is creating doubts about exactly what happened and how this was handled,” said Alejandro Hope, a former Mexican intelligence official and now a security consultant. “The corpse was snatched at the end of the process. I don’t know what to make of that.”

Perhaps neither did President Felipe Calderón, who is only two months away from the end of a six-year term that will be remembered for his aggressive pursuit of criminal gangs. Yet he did not rush to trumpet what analysts said was perhaps the biggest takedown of a drug lord in his tenure.

With questions swirling about the case and even some doubts raised over whether the dead man was Mr. Lazcano, Mr. Calderón waited until midafternoon Tuesday to comment, and only then at the dedication of a new federal prison in central Mexico. There he saluted the marines in the operation, and said Mr. Lazcano “was gunned down resisting authority” and emphasized his administration’s successes in killing or capturing 25 of the 37 organized crime figures federal prosecutors have identified as the most wanted.

American officials, too, kept their distance, issuing no public statement pending their own analysis of the case. A senior law enforcement official said the Americans had not provided the intelligence for the raid and wondered whether the marines initially knew it was Mr. Lazcano who had been killed, given the apparent lack of security.

Other security experts with ties to Mexican law enforcement also suggested that the marines came upon him by accident or with sketchy information on who exactly was in the town, an interpretation that seemed to correspond with the navy’s version of events.

The navy said in a statement on Monday night that, after receiving citizen complaints, it confirmed that armed members of an organized crime group were in the town, Progreso, and when marines confronted a vehicle, the assailants attacked with grenades. Two men were killed in the clash and were turned over to state authorities, the navy said. When the initial forensic examination was done, there were “strong signs” that one of the men was Mr. Lazcano, the statement said.

The state prosecutor in Coahuila, Homero Ramos, said that investigators had been called to the scene of the armed clash on Sunday evening and had taken the bodies to the funeral home, where autopsies were conducted and fingerprints and pictures taken before both bodies were stolen around 1:30 a.m. on Monday. He did not explain why the bodies were taken to a funeral home rather than to a government morgue, the usual practice.

Almost an entire day passed before any hint of what had taken place leaked out. About an hour before Mexico’s most-watched newscast at 10:30 p.m. on Monday, the main anchor for that show began sending Twitter messages saying that it appeared Mr. Lazcano had been killed.

Photo

The Mexican navy said that it had killed Mr. Lazcano in a battle between marines and men armed with guns and grenades on Sunday afternoon in Coahuila State in northern Mexico.Credit
The New York Times

It was big news, and analysts said it was one of the more crippling of a series of recent blows to the gang, whose leadership has been under attack from within and by Mexican forces. But the authorities did not acknowledge that the bodies were missing until two Mexican newspapers reported the theft on Tuesday.

Mr. Lazcano, who was in his late 30s, deserted more than a decade ago from an elite Mexican Army unit. Along with other former special forces operatives from Mexico and Guatemala, he founded, trained and recruited armed men to serve as enforcers for the powerful Gulf Cartel.

The Zetas split off on their own two years ago and have fought their former allies and the Sinaloa Cartel, run by the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, known as El Chapo, or Shorty, who is wanted as badly here as Osama bin Laden once was by the United States.

But the Zetas stand out among the country’s two or three largest criminal groups for their butchery, beheading enemies and murdering civilians, including migrants passing through their turf. They have staged some of the country’s most spectacular jailbreaks and the most brazen attacks on Mexican security forces.

Lately, security analysts have reported that the Zetas themselves are fracturing into at least two groups, and Mr. Lazcano’s death, along with the recent captures of other top Zeta leaders, will probably sow more confusion and violence among the ranks.

Zeta leaders are believed to be turning on one another through executions and providing tips to law enforcement. Another Mexican Navy operation against the Zetas on Sunday, in Nuevo Laredo, led to the capture of a man whom the authorities said was the gang’s regional leader in three border states.

Eduardo Guerrero, a security consultant here, said it appeared that the Mexican government, which frequently acts on intelligence provided by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, had been hitting the Zetas particularly hard and capitalizing on the divisions in the group. He said there had been 17 major arrests of leaders of the group over the past year.

The marines are considered Mexico’s most professional force and have made some of the most significant captures and kills in the drug war. But they are also responsible for one of the bigger fiascos in Mr. Calderón’s term, when they falsely arrested a man in June presumed to be the son of Mr. Guzmán. Prosecutors later said it was a different man.

Correction: October 9, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a jailbreak in which the Zetas are believed to have been involved. It was last month, not last week.

A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Killing a Drug Kingpin, Mexico Lets the Body Get Away. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe